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Monday, October 19, 2015

For
a long time, Google Maps Android SDK requires us to have
WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE
permission.
It was not the case when they first released the SDK.

I
didn’t want to have that storage permission first, because In app permission “The
permission description says that the application can access files
on the devices such as images, videos or audio”.

I
had lots of 1,
2, 3 stars in
app ratings because of this. Users say that “Why
do you request access for my photos and videos?”.
They are right! They are always right. I don’t want to access your
photos and I won’t. I am forced to have that permission.

Android
Marshmallow brought
us run-time permissions. They are great! Users do not see permissions
when they install or update the app. Users have more control over the
app’s functionality.

for
example, a user could choose to give a camera app access to the
camera but not to the device location.

But
imagine you have an app with Google
Maps integration,
and imagine you have to request WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE
on
runtime to show the map. How would you explain that to users? Runtime
permissions that are not obvious and require explanation are the
worse. This is one of them.

Fortunately,
they fixed the issue and removed storage permission. But not for all,
just for Android Marshmallow.

If
you use Google
Maps and
you want to target Android
Marshmallow,
this is what you need to do:

First
you need to use Google
Play Services 8.1.0

Second,
you need to add maxSdkVersion
property
in your permissions as shown below:

They
also say in the documentationthat
they will remove it completely in the next release.

From
the next release of the Google Play services SDK, the requirement for
the WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission will be completely dropped from
the Google Maps Android API.

Note:
Please
do the described changes in your application if you have Google Maps
and want to target Android M!

Thanks for reading :)

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Thursday, October 1, 2015

For
mobile app developers, picking and choosing a server or cloud
solution for things like storage, push notifications, user
information and analytics can be a struggle.

We have few servers like parse, firebase and more which helps us in
doing all the job of backend without writing a single line of code.

We will compare Parse Vs Firebase in the post.

Heads up: you're comparing apples to
oranges. Tools belonging to different groups are often not directly
comparable because they usually have different intended purposes,
benefits and need.

Firebase

Parse

Description

Real-time
cloud data service

Complete
technology stack for building mobile apps

Storage

NoSQL

SQL

Setup

Easy

Easy

Documentation

Great Documentation

Well documented

Hosting

Yes

Yes

Supports

Android/iOS/REST/Web

Android/iOS/REST/Web/PHP/.NET
and more

Authentication

Firebase
makes authentication easy. It can integrate with your existing
login server, or authenticate users with only client-side code. It
has built-in functionality for email & password, and
third-party providers such as Facebook, Twitter, GitHub, and
Google.

Users
can be created through traditional username/password signup,
through a third-party login system like Facebook or Twitter, or
even by using Parse's automatic
anonymous users functionality.